


Significantly Personal

by orphan_account



Category: due South
Genre: Backstory, Jewelry, M/M, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-26
Updated: 2014-04-26
Packaged: 2018-01-20 22:13:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1527581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fraser speculates wildly about Ray's bracelet and then goes to the source.  Unauthorized sequel to "Personal Significance" by DesireeArmfeldt, and makes little sense outside that context</p>
            </blockquote>





	Significantly Personal

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Personal Significance](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1402771) by [DesireeArmfeldt](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesireeArmfeldt/pseuds/DesireeArmfeldt). 



> This is an unauthorized sequel to "Personal Significance" by DesireeArmfeldt. While she and I have been known to be in cahoots on occasion, this time the collaboration is entirely one-sided. I read, I pondered, I sequeled.
> 
> And thanks to guest commenter new_ds_fan for pointing out an error that this older (maybe?) ds fan missed!

Fraser imagines all kinds of things about Ray’s bracelet. Ray and Stella, impossibly young and in love, at a carnival, Ray winning Stella a stuffed unicorn she was too old for at the marksmanship booth, Stella turning around and stamping something on a dog tag at the engraving machine. S&R, 19/6/82. Then Fraser remembers that Ray is a man of a different country from his own and re-imagines the engraving: S&R, 6/19/82.

In Fraser’s mind’s eye, Stella, her face free of the pinched expression Fraser tends to associate with her, laughed up at Ray, wrapped the bracelet with the dog tag around his wrist. Ray laughed as he looked down at Stella, swearing he’d never remove it, then they both laughed a bit more before suddenly stopping, the midway around them fading away as Ray leaned down to kiss Stella before they, too, tastefully dissolved to black. Fraser’s mind’s eye is, he freely acknowledges, heavily influenced by Frank Capra.

Or maybe it wasn’t romantic, or at least not that kind of romantic. Perhaps Barbara Kowalski has, or had, a bachelor uncle who’d served in the Pacific. A man Ray looked up to, admired. A man who didn’t want his nephew to go into military service and had given Ray the chain, a chain he had removed from the still-warm body of a brother-in-arms. And Ray had somberly promised not to go into the army but still gone into service as a policeman.

Or perhaps it was the opposite. Perhaps Ray’s father had a maiden aunt who’d been in the Women’s Auxiliary Corps, wishing she could’ve served more closely to the front. She’d given him her dog tag chain, trying to persuade him to join the army. Ray’s father would’ve object to that even more strongly than he’d objected to the police force, Fraser imagines, and while he hadn’t chosen to go the direction his possible great-aunt wanted for him, he’s been wearing the bracelet ever since in solidarity. Maybe the possible great-aunt had tried to intervene, to make Damian Kowalski see that law enforcement was a noble calling after all.

It’s always possible that it was Ray on the midway, but by himself. Maybe he and Stella had been through some sort of dramatic, young-love breakup and Ray had gone to the movies, to a revival of _Bullitt_ , admiring the way Steve McQueen commanded his car, his right hand, watch flashing on his wrist, moving gracefully from steering wheel to gearshift and back again. Ray had tried to wear his watch on his right hand, but found it too distracting, but then ended up on the midway…no, not on the midway, but in some kind of penny arcade, just down the street from the movie theater, and then he’d gotten the dog tag, maybe stamped something dramatic and melancholy on it, wrapped the chain around his right wrist.

And of course the breakup, that breakup, had been temporary, so Ray had removed the dog tag but kept the chain as a reminder of how much it had hurt him to be without Stella. And maybe he’d tried to take the bracelet off when he and Stella had separated for good, but by then, _not_ having it was worse than wearing it.

It could even be that there was someone else, not during the marriage, no, Ray would never have cheated on Stella, but maybe during an earlier breakup or just after the divorce, someone who’d taught Ray something important. The girl from the track, who’d taught him to be wary…or at least to try to be wary…of beguiling strangers. Perhaps she’d dropped the chain in her haste to make away with all of Ray’s money.

Fraser wonders, sometimes, very late at night, addled from lack of sleep, insomnia induced by some casual comment Ray’d made during the day, or some sidelong glance he’d given Fraser, those little moments that seemed to indicate that Ray had, and Fraser knows he’s just two steps shy of moving into his castle in the air when he thinks these thoughts, but….

There’s an _interest_ there. Fraser’s equally sure and unsure that Ray is looking at him in ways Ray Vecchio never did. Maybe the other person, the not-Stella who’d given Ray the bracelet, was someone who, somehow, either graphically or indirectly, showed Ray that there were, in life, options beyond Stella. Beyond women.

Fraser tries very hard, really he does, not to think of what this man might have said to Ray. Done to Ray. Done _with_ Ray. Running his chain along Ray’s body, wrapping it around Ray’s….

Well, Fraser tries not to think of that.

Instead he remembers Ray’s friendship. Remembers it when they’re sitting in Ray’s apartment…well, Fraser’s sitting. Ray’s stretched out on the couch, facing Fraser but with his eyes closed, his right hand groping out for the soda can he’s got sitting on the floor. The chain clanks against the can and something inside Fraser breaks.

“Why the bracelet, Ray?” he asks, shocking himself. Ray doesn’t seem to be terribly thrown off by the sudden question. He opens his eyes a little to look at Fraser.

“Why the question, Fraser?” Ray asks him. Fraser just shrugs at Ray, because he doesn’t really know and he doesn’t like that he doesn’t really know. “It’s been over a year and you’re just now asking me?”

Fraser resists the urge to back-paddle against this current, to take his usual stance of deferring to individual privacy on these matters. He doesn’t know why he won’t retract the question, he just knows that he shouldn’t. And he's not even really sure that he could; this afternoon has turned oddly dreamlike and otherworldly, just the two of them drifting around in the warmth of Ray's apartment.

Ray relents.

“I get it,” he says. “You’re a private guy, you respect that for other people even though maybe they aren’t so hot at returning the favor. So for you to ask about this,” Ray raises his hand, flat in the air, turned so that Fraser can get a really good look at the bracelet, “that’s gotta be like…. I dunno, like some kind of milestone in our relationship, ya think?”

“I know a lot about your life,” Fraser says, and now he knows why he’s letting himself surrender to this current, because now that he’s looking at it, at Ray, at their “relationship,” at _them_ , it’s obvious. Ray’s signaling to Fraser and has been, all this time, and Fraser’s castle isn’t in the air at all.

“Things I’ve told you on a, you know, voluntary basis,” Ray says. “Sure, you ask questions, but only after I’ve told you there’s something to ask about.”

“And now I’m asking without being prompted,” Fraser says, feeling unbelievably bold but, oddly, not in the least frightened. It’s the way Ray is looking at him, how he’s started to move his hand slowly as if he’s trying to hypnotize Fraser.

“This guy, DiMarco, when I went undercover as Krizanc oh, like, five years ago or so. That was my first undercover job, short-term, just a few days. Anyhow, DiMarco was telling me some stuff about being undercover and he said he did that thing where you’re trying to break a habit. You know, like cracking your knuckles or something, and you wear a rubber band and you snap it against your wrist every time you catch yourself cracking your knuckles.”

“Self-inflicted negative reinforcement,” Fraser says, just to have something to say.

“Something like that,” Ray says, nodding. “So I put a rubber band on my wrist and I’d snap it whenever I needed to get my head back on track for the undercover gig.”

“I see,” Fraser says. So this is an undercover thing, something Ray does to remind himself that he’s not really who he claims to be.

“Yeah, so when I got this gig, being Vecchio, I knew it would take longer than a rubber band would last. So I got this chain out.”

“You had it already?”

“Yeah, it was…was just something from Stella and me when we were kids.”

“Ah,” Fraser says, trying to tamp down his disappointment. It does come back to Stella, after all. With Ray, maybe everything does.

“Nah, not like that,” Ray says, as if he knows what “that” means. Fraser’s not sure he himself does.

“It was…it was just stupid, and I had it because…well, I found it once and it reminded me of good times and so I kept it. But when I pulled it out for this job, being Vecchio, it really didn’t mean much to me anymore.”

Fraser wonders how that could be true. How could something Stella gave him, which he’d hung onto for years, which he now wears constantly…how can that not mean much?

“So after Vecchio briefed me and I read the files and talked to Ma and Frannie and all them…I got this out to remind myself not to do anything stupid.”

“Not to endanger your undercover work and consequently Ray Vecchio’s life, then?”

Ray looks directly at Fraser, his eyes now fully open and…. Fraser tells himself that he can’t possibly be seeing what he thinks he’s seeing, it can’t be, he really has lost whatever sanity he once had.

“Something like that. But it didn’t work.”

“You’re doing an admirable job,” Fraser reassures Ray automatically. Certainly the whole fiction of Ray Kowalski being Ray Vecchio is paper-thin at best, but that’s all it needs to be, really. Just a paper trail for Ray Vecchio if anyone should inquire.

“Not really, Fraser,” Ray says ruefully, and again Fraser seesaws back into hope. There’s something about the way Ray’s taking him for this particular ride that’s doing Fraser in, making him dizzy with hope and want, transfixing him.

“See, it was actually there to remind myself not to fall in love with you, ‘cause after hearing about you, seeing your picture, too, to be honest…. I kinda knew that I’d have to watch out for that.”

“Oh,” Fraser says softly and this is it, this is the payoff, this is what his subconscious has been trying to tell him for months now, has been screaming at him all through this nigh-hypnagogic conversation, this dreamy time in Ray’s apartment that’s been feeling like the space between worlds. This is how he could listen to Ray with more hope than fear, because he _knows_ Ray now, he really does, knows him well enough to ask the most intimate question and not be afraid of the answer.

“Didn’t work,” Ray concludes with rueful casualness. Fraser blinks a few times, then looks at Ray, seeing him again, seeing him that first time in his mind, a double exposure of Ray looking open and friendly and hopeful.

“I, ah,” Fraser clears his throat. “I didn’t have a bracelet to remind me not to do anything stupid.”

“Oh, you never do anything stupid,” Ray says. Fraser’s about to protest, to tell Ray that he’s capable of extraordinary idiocy, but then he realizes that Ray’s being gently sarcastic, teasing him.

“I didn’t know that there was an ongoing danger,” Fraser said. “If anyone had been given the chance to tell me what was going to happen when I came back, I might have gotten a bracelet of my own.”

Ray sits up, one of his sudden, fluid, graceful moves that has him kneeling next to Fraser’s chair. He’s taking the bracelet off, draping it over Fraser’s wrist, his hands warm on Fraser’s, the bracelet just as warm on Fraser’s skin.

“You can have mine,” he offers. “Like I said, too late for me.”

Fraser runs his thumb over the chain, first just letting his nail slide over the ball bearings, wondering if it sounds as loud to Ray as it does to Fraser. He thinks maybe it does, since Ray’s stiffening a little. Fraser turns his thumb over, lets gravity push the pad of it gently on to Ray’s skin, sweeping back and forth.

“For me as well,” Fraser confesses softly, leaning forward until he’s nearly whispering the words against Ray’s lips.

“Yeah,” Ray says, “I kinda….” And then they stop talking because they have other ways to say what they feel.


End file.
